The Country Making Orphanages Obsolete

Milena Malanciuc clearly recalls the day she was sent to an orphanage, when she was just five. She had been playing in the park with her older cousin. On their return home, they found a large black car waiting at the gate of Milena’s house. Strangers ushered her into it without explaining why, or where they were taking her.

The orphanage, she says, was a big, stark building made up of lots of corridors, filled with adults and children — 200 or so children in total, separated into dorms of around 12.

“When the car drove off, I was confused, wondering what would happen to me. I didn’t understand why I was there, where my mother was, or where my freedom had gone,” says Milena.

It transpired that the child’s mother, who had been single, unemployed and living in poor conditions, had died in hospital of an unknown illness — something Milena would not be told until two years later. She had aunts and uncles, but they weren’t in a position to take her in.

Milena would spend the next year in that orphanage in her native Ukraine, before being transferred to one in Chisinau, the capital of neighboring Moldova, where she stayed until she was finally adopted at the age of seven. 

Her memories of the Chisinau orphanage are of a robotic, unchanging daily routine in a place she likens to “a cold prison,” staffed by caregivers who were often aggressive towards the children.

“You miss freedom, privacy and normal communication. You don’t see anything outside the institution walls. I missed love, attention and care,” she says.

Moldova, like many post-Soviet nations, inherited a system heavily reliant on institutional child care. Prior to 2000, the country had over 17,000 children living in orphanages. Known in the country as residential institutions, they generally had austere conditions and provided a basic level of care and education.

Many children were placed in such institutions not because they were orphans, but because their families lacked the means to care for them, or because they had special needs that families struggled to address as the school system could not accommodate them. Single mothers, who were stigmatized at the time, were also pressured to abandon their babies, often giving false names at maternity wards and fleeing after birth. Young adults exiting orphanages came out with low levels of education and social skills, often leading to unemployment, addiction, crime and homelessness.

But over the past two decades, the Moldovan government has been dismantling this legacy of institutional care, working with non-profits and UNICEF to prevent family separation and reform the child care system. Closing orphanages has given way to building new social support systems for disadvantaged families and single mothers, with the goal of keeping children with their birth families whenever possible. Introducing inclusive education for children with special needs has also been key, destigmatizing what it means to have a child with a disability. Developing a network of compassionate foster families has been at the heart of this shift. 

The launch in 2007 of Moldova’s National Strategy to reform its residential childcare system aimed to deinstitutionalize 50 percent of children housed in orphanages as the country began focusing on raising social standards to align with the rest of Europe, all in preparation for EU membership, which it is still negotiating. Today, only around 700 children remain in Moldova’s orphanages. By 2027, the goal is to have none.

The nonprofit Lumos Foundation has been at the center of this transition, setting up six new early child development and intervention community centers and seven early education facilities, designed to stop children ever entering the care system by helping keep families together. These centers supported around 1,337 children in 2023. The plan now is to launch 24 more early childhood intervention centers across the country.

Lumos has also collaborated with local authorities to reintegrate 1,100 institutionalized children into a family environment, either with their birth family or an adoptive or foster family. Finding and recruiting adoptive and foster families has been one of the biggest challenges.

Marcel Straton, Moldova country director for Lumos — which also operates in Ukraine, Kenya and Colombia — says Moldova needs to create more foster care services and improve how much financial support families receive. “It’s a 24-hour job, but they only get paid for eight hours a day […] We also need to create a temporary foster care system, so foster carers can take annual leave.”

Another challenge, adds Straton, is the high staff turnover in the social protection field. Many who had worked in the previous system ended their childcare career as it was difficult for them to adjust to the requirements and culture of the new system — both from a mindset and skills perspective. Recruiting and training new child support staff has been difficult, he says.

Irina Malanciuc is Lumos’ deputy director of programs. She joined in 2009 after working for the Moldovan Ministry of Health, during which time she was transferred to an orphanage called the Republican Baby Home, which took in children up to the age of six.

Malanciuc set about contacting any blood relatives of Milena’s she could trace, to confirm they could not care for her, and she took her home in the summer of 2008.

Both women recall those early days being tough. For Milena, going to school for the first time brought back the fear of being abandoned again, while Malanciuc, who continued to work full time, had her own parents move in to help navigate this new chapter. Malanciuc’s mother, now grandmother to Milena, would wait outside the school gates all day to reassure Milena her new home was permanent. Malanciuc’s father played the father-figure role.

As director of the Republican Baby Home, Malanciuc inherited a system that one person alone couldn’t change, but in her time there she managed to return 100 children to their families. In between periods at the institution, she worked with UNICEF to reform childcare in Moldova. She also worked on launching maternal centers, where single mothers could stay with their newborns until more permanent support could be established. The institution remains open, but today it only houses 10 children with complex needs.

“To be honest, I was not that comfortable taking that job [at the Republican Baby Home]. All the children were waiting for someone to come and take them home – they just wanted to be in families,” says Malanciuc. “In terms of food or clothes, it was more or less covered, but in terms of love, it was not sufficient. Children need to grow up in families, not in institutions.”

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Milena, now 24, is encouraged by her adoptive mother’s work, and supports the move to close Moldova’s orphanages. “The fact that I managed to leave the institution gave me the chance to discover myself, to set goals, and to hope for something better,” she says.

Though Milena moved out of Malanciuc’s home when she got married last year, the pair remain close and their bond is evident through our interview. They live near each other in Chisinau, and have taken vacations together to Italy, Greece and the U.K. Before the Russian invasion in 2022, they would regularly return to Ukraine together to visit Milena’s birth mother’s grave and reconnect with her other blood relatives.

Scrolling photos courtesy of Irina Malanciuc and the Lumos Foundation.